Paul McCartney has never been one to play it safe in his career, but amongst all the risks he’s taken, he now reveals forming Wings was one of his biggest.
“The main question I had was whether to keep going after The Beatles, because it was a hard act – some might say, an impossible act – to follow,” he shares on his website in response to a question on Twitter. “Once that band had finished, I didn’t know what to do with myself, and trying something new was really risky.”
Paul notes that then deciding to put wife Linda in Wings was another big risk, because “she was not a ‘musician.’” He describes early reviews about her as hurtful: “But I rationalized it by thinking about when we started The Beatles and none of us knew our chords – over time we got better and picked things up.”
McCartney describes the beginning of Wings as going “back to square one.”
“I’d doubled back to almost being nothing – just some guy in the band – and now I was earning my fame again,” he says. “By the time the mid-70s came around when we were doing a big American tour, that was the vindication of it. We were so tight and had come up together, as it were. The risk paid off.”
He says his bandmate John Lennon was a much bigger risk-taker than he was, noting, “If there was a cliff to be jumped off, John would jump!”
“Obviously, I’m not completely square,” he says. “I do a lot of zany stuff! That’s in my character too, but I don’t live my life as a risk-taker. I try and work it out to some extent.”
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